This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Various names are used to refer to electronic address books, and these names include phonebooks, contacts, etc. It is a common practice to update an address book for a variety of reasons. For example, a user may desire to replace certain contact information with suitable texts that are interest to him or her. For instance, a user may wish to have his or her father referred to as “dad” whenever this person's contact information is exhibited. Similarly, a person may wish to have his or her spouse referred to as “honey” whenever this information is exhibited. Other possible desired adjustments may involve the use of a person's nickname (e.g., using “Nick” for “Nicholas” or “Susie” for “Susan”) or the modification of a particular attribute, such as changing the term “telephone” to “fone” or “phone”. This type of adjusting of information is often referred to as the “personalization” or “customization” of contact information, and each of these actions to be taken are referred to herein as a “personalization rule” or “customization rule.”
A particular contact within an address book may also have related information that is beyond the scope of a conventional address book. This information may include, for example, Presence information, user settings, customization information, etc. In such cases, a mapping is required between pieces of information that concern the same contact (i.e., the same user) so that this information can be consistently merged within a device's user interface and/or can be handled properly by an application, by a client in a device, and/or by an entity within a network.
A Network Address Book (NAB) is an address book stored in a network. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is in the process of standardizing an NAB in terms of a Converged Address Book (CAB). With such standardization, a CAB may define a network repository for the contact information of a user, referred to as a Personal Contact Card (PCC). A user is expected to maintain and update his/her PCC in the network. The repository of the PCC's of various users is referred to herein as a PCC server.
In the CAB standardization process, requirements have been promulgated for the personalization contact information in a manner by which information which has been personalized by a user can be harmonized across all of the user's devices. The CAB standardization also requires the integration of Presence information in an address book in order to improve the overall user experience, requiring a suitable mechanism for merging/mapping contact information from an address book and Presence information that comes from a different source. Personalization rule and user settings, maintained by a user or a service provider, must also correctly map to the contact information of a specific contact when so needed. Personalization rules or user settings may also have default values, with not requirement that they be maintained by anyone.